That about sums it up, no? But here's some backstory, anyway. Just a little backstory. The tiny bits of EVERYTHING I HAVEN'T BEEN WRITING ABOUT FOR THE PAST THREE MONTHS. (Well, not everything. The Saga of the Car also has yet to be penned.)
A year after making aliyah, having had a grand total of three (3) interviews for engineering jobs, I realized it was time to restart my job hunt, because this wasn't working. So I dug up the initial responses I got when I sent out my CV to everyone I knew, and started looking at leads that hadn't seemed relevant a year ago. One of those leads was from B2's rebbetzin (speaking of which, thank you Ema for passing my CV along to her), who suggested I look into "technical writing."
I contacted her friend the technical writer (whom I shall cleverly dub TW), and spoke with him for about 45 minutes. By the end, we were happily discussing minutiae such as when to use bullet points versus when to use numbers for lists. (For the curious, use numbers if the order matters, and use bullet points if the order of the steps is irrelevant.) Seeing that this was something right up my nerd alley, I got pretty excited. Then I realized that I have experience as a technical writer. Sure, I had just learned what "technical writing" means, but that can't negate the fact that as part of my previous job, I spent three years writing manuals for all of the lab tools and processes. Because it was necessary, and nobody else was doing it. And thus, I grabbed three years of experience in a job whose name I didn't learn until just now. Perfect.
On TW's recommendation, I joined a Yahoo group for technical writers in Israel, reading the chatter and keeping my eyes open for job postings. Shortly thereafter, I found myself living in a dream-like state: after essentially nothing for so long, I had five (5) interviews within two (2!) weeks.
Luckily, my favorite interview was for the job I actually got. Cleverly, the interview started with an hour-long exam, which essentially checked that I am actually capable of doing the job I came to interview for. Thankfully, if I've been gifted with one skill that's useful in school but not in real life, it's testing freakishly well. If you want me to learn a new skill really quickly, just give me a test. (Seriously, I had no idea what was going on at all for my first month or so of Differential Equations, but I still scored 40%-60% on the daily quizzes by just making stuff up. Because not to brag or anything, but it seems that I can cobble together almost half of basic Diff EQ as long as you tell me that This is an Exam.)
The technical writing exam consisted of two parts: the first question asked me to "document the following screen" and the blessed second question asked me to "edit the following documentation." Well, once I edited the horrific mess presented in the second question, I had a template of how to document the screen in the first question. So I did. And since my interview immediately followed my exam, I went into it confident, focused, and relaxed, which is not how I usually feel going into interviews. Gosh, I miss taking tests. If anyone knows of an analogous real-world situation that comes up reasonably frequently, please let me know.
So yeah. I came back three more times (they apologized about that: stuff kept coming up forcing the process onto separate days) and on the third visit I signed a contract. I start on Monday. The job is in Jerusalem, which, without traffic, is 25 minutes from me by car. It's a large company, and the employees seem very friendly. The manuals I will be working on will be in British English, so keep your eyes peeled for a plethora of unexpected u's and s's cropping up in the near future.
Since signing the contract, I've unsubscribed from So Many employment emails. I'm hoping to track down the last of the email sources and banish them before I start. Yay!
Fantastic.
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